Economic Encounters of the Plural Kind

On Catholic Economists

I’m neither Catholic nor an economist, but I did spend 19 years in Catholic school and 4 of those studying economics. Thus, I wanted to add some thoughts to the post by Tyler Cowen at MR on why there aren’t more Catholic economists. Cowen notes:

I follow economics, and economists, fairly closely, but I don’t have much of an idea who the active Catholics are, no matter how you define that term. Nor do many famous Catholic economists, whoever they may be, self-identify in any prominent way that I am aware of.There is a longstanding tradition of Catholic “social economics” and it is one question why that approach has not attracted more talent. It is ghettoized, and considered excessively normative, in part for its preoccupation with questions of social justice. The journal Review of Social Economy used to embody this tradition…

These days, I would think that a Catholic economist should be especially skeptical about the Kaldor-Hicks potential compensation principle as a source of normative judgments…

I don’t know either how many Catholic economists there are. I do know that even at Notre Dame, many of the economists are not Catholic. I’d wager that as of last year, there were more Catholics in the mainstream department than the heterodox one.

I have trouble dismissing, as Cowen seems to, the tradition of Catholic social economics. It’s rooted in Catholic social teaching (for more on that, check out my post on Pope Benedict’s encyclical from last year). The idea that is is excessively normative strikes me as discordant, but could also explain why a distinctively Catholic economics is dying. Imagine that you’re Catholic, interested in social justice, and wanting to follow the advisement of the Pope (who just yesterday said “ethics is not something external but internal to economic rationality and pragmatism”). Would you go into economics, which dismisses such statements as normative? Or would you go into sociology, political science, anthropology, or any other discipline that’s less close-minded than economics?

As someone (again, not Catholic) who is plying those very questions, it’s hard to see why I would go into economics, unless I’m there rare type who wants to pick fights from within. I don’t think Catholicism or social justice is incompatible with economics, but there are real barriers in the discipline that make them seem so.

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I don’t think Catholicism or social justice is incompatible with economics, but there are real barriers in the discipline that make them seem so.

This is what a large part of “heteroeconomics” is all about. The project of “Calholic economics” is very similar to Marxian economics in many respects, which is giving a sound economic basis for distributive justice.

Clearly, orthodox and heterodox economics are based on different ontological, epistemological, and ethical views.

Orthodox economics presumes a particular worldview and then attempts to show that distributive justice is not stand on a solid economic footing because it is “inefficient” and doesn’t square with human nature, which is driven by “maximizing utility.”

The philosophical presumptions of orthodox economics are at least questionable and many are demonstrably false. A Catholic economics is, of course, based on a theological viewpoint as well as a philosophical one. There is nothing wrong with that as long as the economics works without being justified by the theology.

Here is an interesting thing that Martin Lurther King said from the Christian point of view:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

[…] 14, 2010 by Nick Krafft This week we talked about: closing a philosophy department; Catholic economists; deficit falconry; the econ-enviro value gulf; and the Revere Award. Of course, most of you already […]

Open Economics

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